The View From Below

Clio Barnard found a way to share her favourite children’s tale and the harash reality of life at the bottom, she tells Anthony Carew.

These two ideas eventually lead to her second feature, The Selfish Giant, in which she takes Wilde’s tale as a jumping-off point for her own parable. Creating two lead characters inspired by Matty and Michael – Swifty (Shaun Thomas) and Arbor (Conner Chapman) – she paints a socio-realist portrait of hard scrabble lives in industrial northern Britain. “It’s a film about what happens when greed is adopted as an ideology, and what elements of our humanity get lost when that happens,” explains Barnard. “It’s a fable that has a broader social-political quality.”

There’s a sense that, if you’re lowest levels of society, that it’s your own fault; that if those people worked harder and accumulated more – if they were greedier – that they wouldn’t be where they were.

Barnard had just started work on The Selfish Giant when the 2011 London Riots broke out. She watched them on the “tellies” in Bradford with the kids who were her film’s inspiration. The riots were happening far from their homes, but were so close to home, and Barnard wanted to capture that sense of anger and frustration in The Selfish Giant.

“I think of my films as being angry, in their own way. Now that I’m talking to you, it seems so clear that they are political, but I don’t think of it as a political anger when I’m making them. To me, it’s much more of a human anger, an outrage at the imbalance we have in society.”

In cinemas 31 July